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Wednesday, February 06, 2019
'Rise Up!' helps students and teachers find their inner Lin-Manuel Miranda
Datebook: If you’re an educator watching “Hamilton,” it’s not a big leap to imagine how the musical might help teach students about the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers, the miraculous creation of a republic governed by checks and balances.
2 comments:
Lenora G
said...
I have two very unrelated thoughts about this. The first is that it's interesting to me that at one point I would have read about poetry and movement as a way to teach adults or high school students and I thought it was ridiculous, until I got here and saw how impactful it can be to use movement to tell a story and understand it. The second thought, is that I've noticed that more and more history teachers are incorporating Hamilton into their curriculum, because it helps to get the students to connect with the material. I remember in APUSH getting to the unit where Hamilton was featured, and spending significant portions of the class talking about the accuracies and inaccuracies of the musical, and discussing the story. I think that bringing pop culture into the classroom to get students to connect is an excellent way to get kids to actually engage with material they aren't necessarily a fan of, because you could almost see the classroom light up when she brought up Hamilton, and they became excited to learn about it.
In junior year U.S. history we watched Hamilton. I was overjoyed of course because to this date its the only version I’ve ever seen. A bootleg found by my history teacher was the basis for teaching this section because it kept the students interested. Hamilton provides a personal story. Learning how to rattle off names in american history with maybe one fact about them is only so helpful in everyday life. A personal story line tells you so much more about the society at the time and how they lived and interacted with it as long as you acknowledge the slips from the truth. The section of this article that spoke the most to me was the opportunity to show teachers how to confront the suppressing systems most have been complicit in. At my highschool they started a program to work on that with teachers who would then try to pass on the message with their students and by senior year the difference in teaching was clear.
2 comments:
I have two very unrelated thoughts about this. The first is that it's interesting to me that at one point I would have read about poetry and movement as a way to teach adults or high school students and I thought it was ridiculous, until I got here and saw how impactful it can be to use movement to tell a story and understand it. The second thought, is that I've noticed that more and more history teachers are incorporating Hamilton into their curriculum, because it helps to get the students to connect with the material. I remember in APUSH getting to the unit where Hamilton was featured, and spending significant portions of the class talking about the accuracies and inaccuracies of the musical, and discussing the story. I think that bringing pop culture into the classroom to get students to connect is an excellent way to get kids to actually engage with material they aren't necessarily a fan of, because you could almost see the classroom light up when she brought up Hamilton, and they became excited to learn about it.
In junior year U.S. history we watched Hamilton. I was overjoyed of course because to this date its the only version I’ve ever seen. A bootleg found by my history teacher was the basis for teaching this section because it kept the students interested. Hamilton provides a personal story. Learning how to rattle off names in american history with maybe one fact about them is only so helpful in everyday life. A personal story line tells you so much more about the society at the time and how they lived and interacted with it as long as you acknowledge the slips from the truth. The section of this article that spoke the most to me was the opportunity to show teachers how to confront the suppressing systems most have been complicit in. At my highschool they started a program to work on that with teachers who would then try to pass on the message with their students and by senior year the difference in teaching was clear.
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